but why make a new hammer out of clay when Microsoft and IBM already have steel hammers that are have a much longer, and more proven, track record?
1. AIX is an expensive proposition, and it's supposed to be pretty weird to use. Expertise is much harder to come by. The Power systems are apparently very good, but they're not for everyone.
2. Microsoft's products do not have a very good track record, and Microsoft's record in the server business is one of the shortest. NT was only released in '94, right, and didn't really catch on until '96 with NT 4.
3. Many people have applications that they need to run under Unix. I'm one of them. Linux suits our purposes fine, and has been more stable on our servers than Windows on our desktops. I would love to have a Power4 or Origin system to play with- they'd run all our apps without a problem- but my boss insists on PC hardware wherever possible. FreeBSD may be good, but it is less "standard"- i.e. is not what most people in our field use.
I work in bioinformatics, and no one in bioinformatics uses Windows for real work, thank god. Almost everyone in our group has Windows on their desktop, sure, but all programming and calculations are done under Linux. Expensive proprietary Unix systems are common, but us academic types can't always afford the latest greatest 16-processor RISC box. Windows does not have a tenth the capabilities and flexibility of Unix for our applications.
And frankly, we don't give a shit about the GPL. We're scientists, not ideologues, and all we care about is that Linux is free and it works.
Okay, then, what should they have bought? I'm assuming they bought a Linux cluster because, like many of us, they wanted to use commodity PC hardware rather than some expensive system proprietary to HP. Personally, for half a million I'd have wanted a nice big SGI Origin system, but most of the people I work for/with are dead-set on buying PC clusters. Which means Linux in virtually every case. (How much PC hardware is supported on *BSD but not Linux, out of curiosity?)
Honestly, I don't understand what's so bad about insisting on Linux. I don't hold it against large companies that they insist on Windows every time they buy business desktops. And since the poster already said they'd bought one Linux cluster, why should they buy another product that would be incompatible? Your responses indicate that you're even less qualified to make these types of decisions than you accuse the AC of being.
Not based on whether or not it does the job properly, with a minimum of downtime or hassle, but exclusively on whether or not it runs Linux?
Whose to say that running Linux isn't necessary to do the job properly with a minimum of downtime and hassle? The parent poster was short on details, but I work in an environment where running Linux is a necessity (although I admit one of the BSDs would work just as well). We would _not_ buy a large (PC) cluster that would not run Linux, because all the apps we use are written for Unix. If they were pushing HP-UX, that might be a different matter, but I can think of plenty of reasons why he might insist on Linux.
Considering he bought a huge PC cluster, I'd imagine his applications are quite specific to Linux. Would you buy a machine for doing VB development if it didn't support Windows?
They prevent you from sharing information with others, thus censoring you.
Sounds like you've read the GNU Manifesto way too many times. Like the vast majority of Americans, I do not believe all information should be freely passed around regardless of the wishes of the creators. The studios are preventing you from sharing information because they want to have the exclusive right to distribute it, as is their right under US law. How is distributing DivX files of Hollywood movies to the world the same as promoting democracy or, for instance, bitching about the DMCA on this site?
Western legal systems have recognized the right of content creators to control the distribution of their works for some time now. If you have a problem with this, move somewhere that doesn't respect these rights. . . like, say, China.:) And for the last fucking time, private lawsuits are not the same as censorship. Censorship is when the government says you can't share kiddie porn on Kazaa.
I agree with you 100%. I think we ought to be fighting the DMCA; it's a crappy law and unfair to consumers. I prefer to watch DVDs under Linux as well, except Ogle doesn't have deinterlacing yet. My complaint is against idiot Slashdot posters who compare America to communist dictatorships because of laws like the DMCA. In China, we'd probably be arrested for having this kind of discussion.
I don't think Kazaa should be banned either; the media companies are overreacting, as always. My point is that they're protecting their rights under US law (overzealously, yes), which is entirely different from censorship, as several other posters have noted.
You still have the right to unelect your congressmen, or to run for office yourself. You also have the right to protest unfair legislation. You're also able to see what's happenning in our government because it is legally required to operate in the open, and you can even see exactly which companies donated money to which politicians. None of this is true in China.
I agree that IP law has tilted in favor of corporations. You're extrapolating this trend to predict corporate-organized totalitarianism. For the benefit of those readers here who haven't yet reached high-school US history, we've been through worse before. Labor strikes used to be broken up with armed troops. Now our economy is tightly regulated to protect the citizens against the industries. The DMCA and SSSCA are troubling, but I hardly think they're any worse than the sort of corporate welfare that's existed for many years.
We live in a mixed economy; deal with it. Socialists and libertarians may not be happy with our system, but it's worked fairly well so far. There are always extremes, where laws unfairly penalize or empower corporations, but I view this is the price of prosperity. The worst of our system usually gets filtered out sooner or later. This doesn't mean we shouldn't be vigilant against abuses, but it does mean we shouldn't be as hysterical as you and the original poster.
HORSESHIT. This is one of the stupidest comments I've ever read on Slashdot. Hope somebody mods it as a troll.
Learn the difference between "censorship" and "lawsuits". In the US, the media companies are trying to shut down or control these networks to prevent trading of their IP. This is not censorship. The companies are using their rights within copyright law. The government enforces these rights, but does not act out of personal interest. Sure, laws like the SSSCA would change this, but that'll probably be DOA.
Using the DMCA to prohibit redistribution might be more like censorship. As far as I know, trade secrets have not been accorded anywhere near the same protection as copyrights. The DVDCCA does not have the legal protection for CSS that would normally allow it to pursue the DeCSS publishers like Kazaa et al.; the DMCA (unfairly, I think) allows them to do so anyway.
China is different because the government is not protecting anyone's "rights", however abusrd these rights may be. They're setting up their corner of the Internet to be restricted from the beginning, unlike here where restrictions are (rather unsuccessfully) layered on top of an uncontrolled network. They are attempting to prohibit access to ideas, not copyrighted works. They want to control how their citizens think, not where they obtain (or how they view) their entertainment.
I'm sick of whiny Americans who are so upset about the DMCA that they claim to be oppressed. Your rights are not being violated because the MPAA won't let you download Spiderman. You're so naive from living in a free country that you're incapable of understanding what people in other parts of the world have to go through. What the DMCA is being used for is incomparable next to the evil of communism and totalitarianism.
Want to strike a blow for freedom and democracy? Stop wasting your time bitching about the MPAA and instead organize a boycott of Cisco, a company whose actions imperil the freedom of four times as many people as are affected by the DMCA.
The warez release I saw was a DivX taken from a preview DVD (the kind that gets sent to Oscar voters, etc.). I'd have expected this to be very high quality, especially since the complete movie was more than 1.4GB. In most places, as a previous poster noted, it was VHS quality. Not bad at all- kept me happy until the DVD release, at least. However, I didn't see this until a full four months after the release of the movie.
I'd be interested to know the source of this bootleg. The really crappy ones are from digital video cameras in theaters, but I doubt that's what this is.
Furthermore, no actual ivy league student would be this fucking classless.
Actually, after a few drinks most Ivy League students are just as classless as any state schooled kid. And yes, we do have grade inflation, same as almost all prestigious colleges right now. Yale provides a superior education only to those students willing to work for it. The rest just have well-padded resumes.
Damn straight! I've been trying to explain this to people for a long time now. Any idiot can learn Perl or the basics of biology in a short time. The key is being able to think like an experimental scientist, and know how to develop hypotheses and experiments. And, at the same time, knowledge of theoretical computer science is essential beyond a certain point. I work with uniformly brilliant people, yet I can't help thinking that if they knew enough to optimize their programs or code reusable solutions more they'd be much more efficient. Half of what I do is simply dealing with crap data and setting up systems to make my work easier.
Of course, since the field is hot shit right now, anyone who doesn't get a PhD as soon as possible will be fucked in a few years. That would be me, unfortunately.
The more redundancy, and the more capacity there is for the Internet to route around the kind of damage government censors, politicians, and copyright holders create, the better.
The whole point of the article was that he doesn't want the Internet to route around those people. He wants them to control it- except only if they're European.
The entire article is a soggy mess of anti-American drivel and authoritarianism. There are plenty of reasons to be distasteful or suspicious of us, but he didn't get any of them right.
Except that Clinton signed the DMCA into law. I don't like Bush either, but let's share the blame- and keep in mind that the only politicians to speak out about the SSSCA or whatever-the-fuck it's called now were Republicans. Anyway, both parties grab their ankles for the multinationals; the current administration is just more brazen about it.
"In late April, when as a result of an SEC investigation Nvidia had to restate several years of earnings, the company ended up reporting that it had earned more profits than previously indicated."
The question is, were they playing fast and loose too and just got lucky, or were they simply being sloppy? It would kind of suck to cheat on your financial reports and actually make your numbers worse.
Part of the point of F90 is that you can multiply arrays with a single command (or operator?). This is then parallelized by the compiler. It's a nifty shortcut, if you need to do this kind of thing a lot- not something that can be done with C/C++. Of course, Matlab can do this too, and for tasks that don't take lots of time it may be better. (I read on comp.lang.fortran that some of the modules for Matlab were equivalent to what you'd get writing optimized assembly. . . pretty cool. and expensive.)
There may be a few reasons to use F77 for new software, but I'm not aware of any. The problem is that people hang on to it longer than they should. Far too much of the software I use is written in F77, and the flaws in this are exasperating. I hate having to use the same amount of memory whether I'm dealing with peptide fragments or large protein complexes. . . sure, it's fast, but it's a bitch to try to extend.
The real reason is that they just did it because they could (higher budget) in the first movie, then were stuck with it for all the other movies, and never came up with a good backstory.
And Worf's comment is probably as much a tongue-in-cheek response from the producers as anything else. I'll bet it was actually directed at all the geeks who keep asking about this. It's amazing how much this gets discussed, because it's really a non-issue.
I once saw some Trek documentary where one of the makeup people said he preferred Klingon episodes to Romulan/Vulcan episodes because of "all those damn ears". However, by the time of the movies they could afford to make the races actually look a little different. So they sacrificed continuity for production values. Simple, no?
I always thought part of the genius of Star Wars is how in the cantina scene, so many of the aliens are totally non-humanoid. But it doesn't matter- they're sitting there playing poker, and Luke doesn't seem to notice that some of these things don't have arms. Alien races actually have a true diversity of forms, even if the humans are running things. It's a far cry from ST, where nearly everything is either humanoid or something amorphous.
While I'm at it, Vernor Vinge's books are some of the best depictions I've ever seen of non-humanoid races in human terms.
I'm actually in a situation where Origin 300 may be the most cost-effective solution. With educational discounts, we may be able to buy these boxes for about $25,000 per 4 processors (with 2GB memory). Considering we can then scale it to 32 procs by linking nodes together, this is not at all a bad deal. And the effective bandwidth on a PC is nothing like on an Origin.
As if I don't have enough to worry about at work, in twenty years or so everything is going to be on the freaking internet. I'm going to wake up at 4 am to repeated flushing noises because a 1337 h4>0r has r00ted my Microsoft Toilet (tm). And it's going to take hours to cook dinner because the oven runs Java.
'scuse me. I think someone just 0wned my cellphone.
Not even RMS would argue that promoting proprietary software justifies butchering civilians. Put down the bong and go take a cold shower, if you even have running water where you live.
This is true, and I admit that I've benefited from it where I shouldn't have. I suppose this does directly affect the quality of education, because people have become more obsessed with numbers as the measure of success and intelligence. Hence the flap about Bush's SAT scores and grades, which don't really matter (his persistent anti-intellectualism being evident without his college record).
However, I think this says more about the quality of students rather than the quality of educators. The ideal solution would be to adopt an MIT-like system where the first year is P/F. Frankly, once I stopped caring about my grades as much (anything above a C was fine with me), I learned a lot more.
even though Harvard and Yale have really let their undergraduate programs slip in the past few years
Huh? I just got out of Yale, and I wasn't aware of any recent slips. They've got the same problems as most large private universities, and the program definitely isn't perfect. But I'd bet that it's actually improved considerably in the past decade, since Yale was in serious financial trouble in the early nineties.
I believe that one of the biggest reasons why MIT is not an ivy-league school is that they do not offer any athletic scholarships. And they'll be stuck with their current category until they do so. It is interesting to note that as a matter of fact MIT does not offer any scholarships as such!
Wrong! Yale does not do this either. They only offer need-based assistance, though various third parties may have Yale-related scholarships. As far as I know, we've never had athletic scholarships, and opinion is pretty strong against introducing them. The Ivy League also does not have football games after Thanksgiving, based on the premise that students are here to work, not play games.
I don't know if this applies to the other Ivies as well, but I suspect it does to most of them. Stanford, on the other hand, does have athletic scholarships, which as far as I'm concerned is the only thing keeping them from being in the same class as the Ivies. (their academics and research, of course, being about equal.)
Slashdot Mirror
but why make a new hammer out of clay when Microsoft and IBM already have steel hammers that are have a much longer, and more proven, track record?
1. AIX is an expensive proposition, and it's supposed to be pretty weird to use. Expertise is much harder to come by. The Power systems are apparently very good, but they're not for everyone.
2. Microsoft's products do not have a very good track record, and Microsoft's record in the server business is one of the shortest. NT was only released in '94, right, and didn't really catch on until '96 with NT 4.
3. Many people have applications that they need to run under Unix. I'm one of them. Linux suits our purposes fine, and has been more stable on our servers than Windows on our desktops. I would love to have a Power4 or Origin system to play with- they'd run all our apps without a problem- but my boss insists on PC hardware wherever possible. FreeBSD may be good, but it is less "standard"- i.e. is not what most people in our field use.
I work in bioinformatics, and no one in bioinformatics uses Windows for real work, thank god. Almost everyone in our group has Windows on their desktop, sure, but all programming and calculations are done under Linux. Expensive proprietary Unix systems are common, but us academic types can't always afford the latest greatest 16-processor RISC box. Windows does not have a tenth the capabilities and flexibility of Unix for our applications.
And frankly, we don't give a shit about the GPL. We're scientists, not ideologues, and all we care about is that Linux is free and it works.
Okay, then, what should they have bought? I'm assuming they bought a Linux cluster because, like many of us, they wanted to use commodity PC hardware rather than some expensive system proprietary to HP. Personally, for half a million I'd have wanted a nice big SGI Origin system, but most of the people I work for/with are dead-set on buying PC clusters. Which means Linux in virtually every case. (How much PC hardware is supported on *BSD but not Linux, out of curiosity?)
Honestly, I don't understand what's so bad about insisting on Linux. I don't hold it against large companies that they insist on Windows every time they buy business desktops. And since the poster already said they'd bought one Linux cluster, why should they buy another product that would be incompatible? Your responses indicate that you're even less qualified to make these types of decisions than you accuse the AC of being.
Not based on whether or not it does the job properly, with a minimum of downtime or hassle, but exclusively on whether or not it runs Linux?
Whose to say that running Linux isn't necessary to do the job properly with a minimum of downtime and hassle? The parent poster was short on details, but I work in an environment where running Linux is a necessity (although I admit one of the BSDs would work just as well). We would _not_ buy a large (PC) cluster that would not run Linux, because all the apps we use are written for Unix. If they were pushing HP-UX, that might be a different matter, but I can think of plenty of reasons why he might insist on Linux.
Considering he bought a huge PC cluster, I'd imagine his applications are quite specific to Linux. Would you buy a machine for doing VB development if it didn't support Windows?
They prevent you from sharing information with others, thus censoring you.
:) And for the last fucking time, private lawsuits are not the same as censorship. Censorship is when the government says you can't share kiddie porn on Kazaa.
Sounds like you've read the GNU Manifesto way too many times. Like the vast majority of Americans, I do not believe all information should be freely passed around regardless of the wishes of the creators. The studios are preventing you from sharing information because they want to have the exclusive right to distribute it, as is their right under US law. How is distributing DivX files of Hollywood movies to the world the same as promoting democracy or, for instance, bitching about the DMCA on this site?
Western legal systems have recognized the right of content creators to control the distribution of their works for some time now. If you have a problem with this, move somewhere that doesn't respect these rights. . . like, say, China.
From now on, I won't allow any Cisco product to touch my packets. That'll teach 'em! Oh, wait... never mind.
You could avoid buying their products, at least. And you could educate your colleagues about how Cisco helps prop up totalitarian regimes.
I agree with you 100%. I think we ought to be fighting the DMCA; it's a crappy law and unfair to consumers. I prefer to watch DVDs under Linux as well, except Ogle doesn't have deinterlacing yet. My complaint is against idiot Slashdot posters who compare America to communist dictatorships because of laws like the DMCA. In China, we'd probably be arrested for having this kind of discussion.
I don't think Kazaa should be banned either; the media companies are overreacting, as always. My point is that they're protecting their rights under US law (overzealously, yes), which is entirely different from censorship, as several other posters have noted.
You still have the right to unelect your congressmen, or to run for office yourself. You also have the right to protest unfair legislation. You're also able to see what's happenning in our government because it is legally required to operate in the open, and you can even see exactly which companies donated money to which politicians. None of this is true in China.
I agree that IP law has tilted in favor of corporations. You're extrapolating this trend to predict corporate-organized totalitarianism. For the benefit of those readers here who haven't yet reached high-school US history, we've been through worse before. Labor strikes used to be broken up with armed troops. Now our economy is tightly regulated to protect the citizens against the industries. The DMCA and SSSCA are troubling, but I hardly think they're any worse than the sort of corporate welfare that's existed for many years.
We live in a mixed economy; deal with it. Socialists and libertarians may not be happy with our system, but it's worked fairly well so far. There are always extremes, where laws unfairly penalize or empower corporations, but I view this is the price of prosperity. The worst of our system usually gets filtered out sooner or later. This doesn't mean we shouldn't be vigilant against abuses, but it does mean we shouldn't be as hysterical as you and the original poster.
HORSESHIT. This is one of the stupidest comments I've ever read on Slashdot. Hope somebody mods it as a troll.
Learn the difference between "censorship" and "lawsuits". In the US, the media companies are trying to shut down or control these networks to prevent trading of their IP. This is not censorship. The companies are using their rights within copyright law. The government enforces these rights, but does not act out of personal interest. Sure, laws like the SSSCA would change this, but that'll probably be DOA.
Using the DMCA to prohibit redistribution might be more like censorship. As far as I know, trade secrets have not been accorded anywhere near the same protection as copyrights. The DVDCCA does not have the legal protection for CSS that would normally allow it to pursue the DeCSS publishers like Kazaa et al.; the DMCA (unfairly, I think) allows them to do so anyway.
China is different because the government is not protecting anyone's "rights", however abusrd these rights may be. They're setting up their corner of the Internet to be restricted from the beginning, unlike here where restrictions are (rather unsuccessfully) layered on top of an uncontrolled network. They are attempting to prohibit access to ideas, not copyrighted works. They want to control how their citizens think, not where they obtain (or how they view) their entertainment.
I'm sick of whiny Americans who are so upset about the DMCA that they claim to be oppressed. Your rights are not being violated because the MPAA won't let you download Spiderman. You're so naive from living in a free country that you're incapable of understanding what people in other parts of the world have to go through. What the DMCA is being used for is incomparable next to the evil of communism and totalitarianism.
Want to strike a blow for freedom and democracy? Stop wasting your time bitching about the MPAA and instead organize a boycott of Cisco, a company whose actions imperil the freedom of four times as many people as are affected by the DMCA.
heh. I work in academia, and that's what our work environment is like. friday kegs, even. gotta keep the grad students and postdocs happy.
The warez release I saw was a DivX taken from a preview DVD (the kind that gets sent to Oscar voters, etc.). I'd have expected this to be very high quality, especially since the complete movie was more than 1.4GB. In most places, as a previous poster noted, it was VHS quality. Not bad at all- kept me happy until the DVD release, at least. However, I didn't see this until a full four months after the release of the movie.
I'd be interested to know the source of this bootleg. The really crappy ones are from digital video cameras in theaters, but I doubt that's what this is.
Furthermore, no actual ivy league student would be this fucking classless.
Actually, after a few drinks most Ivy League students are just as classless as any state schooled kid. And yes, we do have grade inflation, same as almost all prestigious colleges right now. Yale provides a superior education only to those students willing to work for it. The rest just have well-padded resumes.
Damn straight! I've been trying to explain this to people for a long time now. Any idiot can learn Perl or the basics of biology in a short time. The key is being able to think like an experimental scientist, and know how to develop hypotheses and experiments. And, at the same time, knowledge of theoretical computer science is essential beyond a certain point. I work with uniformly brilliant people, yet I can't help thinking that if they knew enough to optimize their programs or code reusable solutions more they'd be much more efficient. Half of what I do is simply dealing with crap data and setting up systems to make my work easier.
Of course, since the field is hot shit right now, anyone who doesn't get a PhD as soon as possible will be fucked in a few years. That would be me, unfortunately.
The Hitler comparison is pretty nauseating. Did anyone else not find that funny? I don't like MS or use their products either, but Christ. . .
The more redundancy, and the more capacity there is for the Internet to route around the kind of damage government censors, politicians, and copyright holders create, the better.
The whole point of the article was that he doesn't want the Internet to route around those people. He wants them to control it- except only if they're European.
The entire article is a soggy mess of anti-American drivel and authoritarianism. There are plenty of reasons to be distasteful or suspicious of us, but he didn't get any of them right.
Except that Clinton signed the DMCA into law. I don't like Bush either, but let's share the blame- and keep in mind that the only politicians to speak out about the SSSCA or whatever-the-fuck it's called now were Republicans. Anyway, both parties grab their ankles for the multinationals; the current administration is just more brazen about it.
The question is, were they playing fast and loose too and just got lucky, or were they simply being sloppy? It would kind of suck to cheat on your financial reports and actually make your numbers worse.
Part of the point of F90 is that you can multiply arrays with a single command (or operator?). This is then parallelized by the compiler. It's a nifty shortcut, if you need to do this kind of thing a lot- not something that can be done with C/C++. Of course, Matlab can do this too, and for tasks that don't take lots of time it may be better. (I read on comp.lang.fortran that some of the modules for Matlab were equivalent to what you'd get writing optimized assembly. . . pretty cool. and expensive.)
There may be a few reasons to use F77 for new software, but I'm not aware of any. The problem is that people hang on to it longer than they should. Far too much of the software I use is written in F77, and the flaws in this are exasperating. I hate having to use the same amount of memory whether I'm dealing with peptide fragments or large protein complexes. . . sure, it's fast, but it's a bitch to try to extend.
The real reason is that they just did it because they could (higher budget) in the first movie, then were stuck with it for all the other movies, and never came up with a good backstory.
And Worf's comment is probably as much a tongue-in-cheek response from the producers as anything else. I'll bet it was actually directed at all the geeks who keep asking about this. It's amazing how much this gets discussed, because it's really a non-issue.
I once saw some Trek documentary where one of the makeup people said he preferred Klingon episodes to Romulan/Vulcan episodes because of "all those damn ears". However, by the time of the movies they could afford to make the races actually look a little different. So they sacrificed continuity for production values. Simple, no?
I always thought part of the genius of Star Wars is how in the cantina scene, so many of the aliens are totally non-humanoid. But it doesn't matter- they're sitting there playing poker, and Luke doesn't seem to notice that some of these things don't have arms. Alien races actually have a true diversity of forms, even if the humans are running things. It's a far cry from ST, where nearly everything is either humanoid or something amorphous.
While I'm at it, Vernor Vinge's books are some of the best depictions I've ever seen of non-humanoid races in human terms.
I'm actually in a situation where Origin 300 may be the most cost-effective solution. With educational discounts, we may be able to buy these boxes for about $25,000 per 4 processors (with 2GB memory). Considering we can then scale it to 32 procs by linking nodes together, this is not at all a bad deal. And the effective bandwidth on a PC is nothing like on an Origin.
As if I don't have enough to worry about at work, in twenty years or so everything is going to be on the freaking internet. I'm going to wake up at 4 am to repeated flushing noises because a 1337 h4>0r has r00ted my Microsoft Toilet (tm). And it's going to take hours to cook dinner because the oven runs Java.
'scuse me. I think someone just 0wned my cellphone.
Not even RMS would argue that promoting proprietary software justifies butchering civilians. Put down the bong and go take a cold shower, if you even have running water where you live.
This is true, and I admit that I've benefited from it where I shouldn't have. I suppose this does directly affect the quality of education, because people have become more obsessed with numbers as the measure of success and intelligence. Hence the flap about Bush's SAT scores and grades, which don't really matter (his persistent anti-intellectualism being evident without his college record).
However, I think this says more about the quality of students rather than the quality of educators. The ideal solution would be to adopt an MIT-like system where the first year is P/F. Frankly, once I stopped caring about my grades as much (anything above a C was fine with me), I learned a lot more.
even though Harvard and Yale have really let their undergraduate programs slip in the past few years
Huh? I just got out of Yale, and I wasn't aware of any recent slips. They've got the same problems as most large private universities, and the program definitely isn't perfect. But I'd bet that it's actually improved considerably in the past decade, since Yale was in serious financial trouble in the early nineties.
I believe that one of the biggest reasons why MIT is not an ivy-league school is that they do not offer any athletic scholarships. And they'll be stuck with their current category until they do so. It is interesting to note that as a matter of fact MIT does not offer any scholarships as such!
Wrong! Yale does not do this either. They only offer need-based assistance, though various third parties may have Yale-related scholarships. As far as I know, we've never had athletic scholarships, and opinion is pretty strong against introducing them. The Ivy League also does not have football games after Thanksgiving, based on the premise that students are here to work, not play games.
I don't know if this applies to the other Ivies as well, but I suspect it does to most of them. Stanford, on the other hand, does have athletic scholarships, which as far as I'm concerned is the only thing keeping them from being in the same class as the Ivies. (their academics and research, of course, being about equal.)
At the Yale/Princeton games I've been to, we (Yale) have shouted "Harvard sucks!". Drives them up the wall...